Nuclear fallout is the residual radioactive material propelled into the upper atmosphere following a nuclear blast, so called because it "falls out" of the sky after the explosion and the shock wave has passed. It commonly refers to the radioactive dust and ash created when a nuclear weapon explodes. The amount and spread of fallout is a product of the size of the weapon and the altitude at which it is detonated. Fallout may get entrained with the products of a pyrocumulus cloud and fall as black rain. This radioactive dust, usually consisting of fission products mixed with bystanding atoms that are neutron-activated by exposure, is a form of radioactive contamination.
The Nevada National Security Site, known as the Nevada Test Site (NTS) until 2010, is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) reservation located in southeastern Nye County, Nevada, about 65 miles (105 km) northwest of the city of Las Vegas. Formerly known as the Nevada Proving Grounds, the site was established in 1951 for the testing of nuclear devices. It covers approximately 1,360 square miles (3,500 km2) of desert and mountainous terrain. Nuclear weapons testing at the site began with a 1-kiloton-of-TNT (4.2 TJ) bomb dropped on Frenchman Flat on January 27, 1951. Over the subsequent four decades, over 1,000 nuclear explosions were detonated at the site. Many of the iconic images of the nuclear era come from the site.
Nuclear weapons tests are experiments carried out to determine the performance, yield, and effects of nuclear weapons. Testing nuclear weapons offers practical information about how the weapons function, how detonations are affected by different conditions, and how personnel, structures, and equipment are affected when subjected to nuclear explosions. However, nuclear testing has often been used as an indicator of scientific and military strength. Many tests have been overtly political in their intention; most nuclear weapons states publicly declared their nuclear status through a nuclear test.
Castle Bravo was the first in a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapon design tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, as part of Operation Castle. Detonated on March 1, 1954, the device was the most powerful nuclear device detonated by the United States and the first lithium deuteride-fueled thermonuclear weapon ever tested using the Teller-Ulam design. Castle Bravo's yield was 15 megatonnes of TNT (63 PJ), 2.5 times the predicted 6 megatonnes of TNT (25 PJ), due to unforeseen additional reactions involving lithium-7, which led to the unexpected radioactive contamination of areas to the east of Bikini Atoll. At the time, it was the most powerful artificial explosion in history.
The Semipalatinsk Test Site, also known as "The Polygon", was the primary testing venue for the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons. It is located on the steppe in northeast Kazakhstan, south of the valley of the Irtysh River. The scientific buildings for the test site were located around 150 km (93 mi) west of the town of Semipalatinsk, later renamed Semey, near the border of East Kazakhstan Region and Pavlodar Region. Most of the nuclear tests taking place at various sites further to the west and the south, some as far as into Karagandy Region.
Storax Sedan was a shallow underground nuclear test conducted in Area 10 of Yucca Flat at the Nevada National Security Site on July 6, 1962, as part of Operation Plowshare, a program to investigate the use of nuclear weapons for mining, cratering, and other civilian purposes. The radioactive fallout from the test contaminated more US residents than any other nuclear test. The Sedan Crater is the largest human-made crater in the United States and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
John William Gofman was an American scientist and advocate. He was Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley.
Downwinders were individuals and communities in the intermountain area between the Cascade and Rocky Mountain ranges primarily in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah but also in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho who were exposed to radioactive contamination or nuclear fallout from atmospheric or underground nuclear weapons testing, and nuclear accidents.
The Pacific Proving Grounds was the name given by the United States government to a number of sites in the Marshall Islands and a few other sites in the Pacific Ocean at which it conducted nuclear testing between 1946 and 1962. The U.S. tested a nuclear weapon on Bikini Atoll on June 30, 1946. This was followed by Baker on July 24, 1946.
The United States Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) is a federal statute implemented in 1990, set to expire in July 2024, providing for the monetary compensation of people, including atomic veterans, who contracted cancer and a number of other specified diseases as a direct result of their exposure to atmospheric nuclear testing undertaken by the United States during the Cold War as residents, or their exposure to radon gas and other radioactive isotopes while undertaking uranium mining, milling or the transportation of ore.
Ernest Joachim Sternglass was a professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the Radiation and Public Health Project. He is an American physicist and author, best known for his controversial research on the health risks of low-level radiation from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and from nuclear power plants.
Philip Jarvis Dolan was an American physicist. He graduated from West Point in 1945, was assigned to the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in 1948, and received his MSc in physics from the University of Virginia in 1956.
Corbin Harney was an elder and spiritual leader of the Newe people. Harney reportedly inspired the creation in 1994 of the Shundahai Network, which works for environmental justice and nuclear disarmament. The Shundahai Network plays a key role in organizing non-violent civil disobedience aimed at bringing about the closure of the Nevada Test Site, used for testing nuclear weapons, which is located on Western Shoshone land.
Philip L. Fradkin was an American environmentalist historian, journalist, and author. Fradkin authored books ranging from Alaska, California, and Nevada, with topics ranging from water conservation, earthquakes, and nuclear weapons.
Upshot–Knothole Harry (UK#9) was a nuclear weapons test conducted by the United States as part of Operation Upshot–Knothole. It took place at the recorded time of 04:05 hours, on May 19, 1953, in Yucca Flat, in the Nevada Test Site. The sponsor of the test was the National Laboratory of the United States of America located at Los Alamos.
Alvin Cushman Graves was an American nuclear physicist who served at the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory and the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. After the war, he became the head of J (Test) Division at Los Alamos, and was director or assistant director of numerous nuclear weapons tests during the 1940s and 1950s. Graves was badly injured in the 1946 laboratory criticality accident in Los Alamos that killed Louis Slotin, but recovered.
Operation Project 58/58A was a series of 4 nuclear tests conducted by the United States in 1957–1958 at the Nevada Test Site. These tests followed the Operation Plumbbob series and preceded the Operation Hardtack I series.
Nuclear ethics is a cross-disciplinary field of academic and policy-relevant study in which the problems associated with nuclear warfare, nuclear deterrence, nuclear arms control, nuclear disarmament, or nuclear energy are examined through one or more ethical or moral theories or frameworks. In contemporary security studies, the problems of nuclear warfare, deterrence, proliferation, and so forth are often understood strictly in political, strategic, or military terms. In the study of international organizations and law, however, these problems are also understood in legal terms. Nuclear ethics assumes that the very real possibilities of human extinction, mass human destruction, or mass environmental damage which could result from nuclear warfare are deep ethical or moral problems. Specifically, it assumes that the outcomes of human extinction, mass human destruction, or environmental damage count as moral evils. Another area of inquiry concerns future generations and the burden that nuclear waste and pollution imposes on them. Some scholars have concluded that it is therefore morally wrong to act in ways that produce these outcomes, which means it is morally wrong to engage in nuclear warfare.
Harold Anthony Knapp was an American mathematician. He earned a doctorate in mathematics with a minor in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1947. He first worked as an operations analyst within the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. He joined the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1955, where he worked within the newly formed Fallout Studies Branch within the Division of Biology and Medicine from 1960 on ; he resigned from the AEC in 1963. He then worked for the Institute for Defense Analyses "which did highly sensitive studies on nuclear warfare for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Defense Nuclear Agency". In 1981, "he joined the Joint Program Office in the Department of Defense, whose innocuous title hid the awesome responsibility of designing and putting into effect a system that would assure the continuity of government during nuclear war."
